Larkin about

Ian Sansom recognises that Larkin may have often sounded like Mr Pooter, but finds in Further Requirements, a collection of reviews, interviews and broadcasts, that he also has the charm and barbs of Oscar Wilde

'I never read your Guardian reviews," Philip Larkin recalls a friend once saying to him, "they're too full of lies." Of course, the only way to check if a review is telling the truth is to read the book oneself, but life is short, money is tight, and the books pages are always full to overflowing. Indeed, even to attempt to verify the judgments contained on this single page of the Guardian, you'd have to be time-rich, cash-rich, and completely barmy.

There are, however, other means of verification. One might appeal, for example, to principles of consistency and coherence. If anything were to convince you to read Philip Larkin's Further Requirements, a collection of reviews, interviews and broadcasts, it would hardly be some booby in the Guardian, but an appeal to what you know of Larkin already.

I shall take it for granted, therefore, that most readers will believe Larkin to be a racist, misogynist, hidebound Little Englander, as revealed in his posthumously published Letters, who has long since been safely outcast from the palace of culture. But I shall also take it for granted that most will have read Larkin's poetry, and possibly his Required Writing (1983), to which Further Requirements is the necessary supplement.

Readers will know and expect, therefore, a writer who may have looked and occasionally sounded like Mr Pooter, but who was possessed more commonly of the charm and barbs of Oscar Wilde. "In childhood," he writes in an early autobiographical piece collected here, "friends are necessary: you cannot bowl to yourself." And again, "I am not a natural traveller: a place has to be pretty intolerable before it enters my head that somewhere else might be nicer." And then, much later, in 1984, "English society has always included a kind of sleeping bag for those members of the educated middle class who didn't want to work; first it was the monasteries, then the court, then the established church and the civil service, and now the universities."

Readers will know and expect a devastating wit. Of Robert Graves's Steps in 1958, he concludes: "Very suitable for Christmas." On not reviewing Edwin Muir's Collected Poems: "This is not the occasion to say why I found Edwin Muir unreadable, but I must be honest and admit that I have never read him and do not mean to start now." Robert Lowell's Life Studies is a work "liberally informed with European properties such as Italy and Ford Madox Ford". And a review of Peter Levi's The Gravel Ponds ends with the simple, eloquent sentence, "The collection is a choice of the Poetry Book Society."

Readers will know and expect a writer as certain and as comfortable in his methods and opinions as Coleridge or John Betjeman, and more than prepared to defend them. Faced with the usual accusations of miserablism, he retorts: "What's disenchanted about describing a hospital, or a nursing home?" And in a typically bracing and brilliant defence of Betjeman: "Betjeman is a kind of distorting mirror in which all the catchphrases of modern criticism appear in gross unacceptable parody. He is committed, ambiguous, and ironic; he is conscious of literary tradition, but does not quote the right authors. He is a satirist, but his satire, directed against liberal atheists, hums disconcertingly round our own ears... And he has forged a personal utterance, created a private myth, brought a new language and new properties to poetry... all these equally undeniably, yet none of them quite in the way we meant."

Betjeman and nursing homes excepted, readers will also know and expect Larkin's liking for the thoroughly unlikely. Throughout Further Requirements you can find expressions of admiration for the Beats, Walt Whitman, the Liverpool poets, and even Gertrude Stein. He was a novelist who became a poet, and his poems read like condensed novels. Demonstrating his skills of precis in a review of a clutch of British Council pamphlets, he writes: "How many exported lecturers, still half-stunned by last night's sake or local whisky, have not reached for the appropriate olive-green British Council specific against all those attentive faces in an hour's time?"

Readers will know and expect self-deprecation disguising self-esteem. In an interview in 1981: "Please don't think that I'm great. If I'm noticeable, it's because we're in a trough at the moment... If I seem good, it's because everyone else is so bad. Well, almost everyone. Well, anyway..." And readers will know and expect huge emotions and at times a rather teary hopefulness. The most moving sentence in the book comes from the transcript of Larkin's appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1976. Roy Plomley: "And thank you, Philip Larkin, for letting us hear your desert island discs." Larkin: "I look forward to being rescued."

Readers will know and expect, then, a writer unprepossessing in every way, and exceeding all expectations. His secret seems to have been to try not to lie. And he asks a very pertinent question: "One thing I do feel a slight restiveness about is being typed as someone who has carved out for himself a uniquely dreary life, growing older, having to work, and not getting things he wants and so on - is this so different from everyone else? I'd like to know how all these romantic reviewers spend their time - do they kill a lot of dragons, for instance?" The answer is an emphatic no.